Functional Polymers

Scope

Following on in the tradition of events jointly organized by the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC, San Sebastian, Spain), the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany) and the European Network of Excellence SoftComp, a workshop on "Functional Polymers" is being organized to take place in spring 2018 in San Sebastian, Spain.

The workshop focuses on advanced polymer materials bringing together physicists and chemists who are interested in novel polymer nanocomposites, polymers functionalized with supramolecular groups and functional soft nano-objects:

(i) Single chain nanoparticles (SCNPs) display a molecular architecture containing multiple locally compact, but accessible, sites/cavities/zones so-called "local pockets" offering the possibility to anchor, either temporally or permanently, active species like e.g. catalysts or drugs. This offers huge possibilities for developing applications in nanomedicine, biosensing, bioimaging, catalysis and many other uses.

(ii) One component nanocomposites (OCNC) overcome the dispersion challenge and are expected to display structure-related ‘emergent’ properties that make them unique within the general field of nanocomposites (NC). OCNC have been proposed for energy storage in supercapacitors; for precise manufacturing of tunable hypersonic photonic crystals, as particle-brush building blocks for self-healing materials and biomedical polypeptide-based hybrids for drug carriers or building blocks for tissue engineering.

A combination of OCNC or SCNP with such supramolecular moieties may open routes to novel advanced materials featuring the advantages of supramolecular systems and the properties of the novel nanocomposites. Designing such materials is a highly interdisciplinary process and requires synergies of physics and chemistry as well as of microscopic and macroscopic investigations.